Here’s what it looks like after 7 (top) and 30 (bottom) days of averaging to give an idea of how much more reliability you can buy with a week or month of grid storage.
Of course, there is also variability on the demand side you need to match. Hmm…
So, a few thoughts on this. If you consider the minimum on any of these graphs as a kind of base load capacity, you would need to build enough solar and wind to cover what’s demanded by the population. The fluctuating part above that line is excess which maybe might find some sort of opportunistic use but will more likely be discarded. I guess the industry term for this is curtailment.
The more you invest in storage, the less you will need to curtail. But given that even with a month worth of storage (which is a colossal amount if you crunch the numbers), there will be some curtailment, my takeaway from this is that there is room for synthetic fuel production like green hydrogen that would kick in once you’ve saturated all your batteries, pumped hydro, etc. I’d been wondering about this. There is energy loss (relative to say batteries) in making fuel out of electricity, but the energy in this case is essentially free, so why not give it a go? And we are really good at stockpiling fuels. The amount of energy stored that way around the world is orders of magnitude beyond everything else combined.
The problem with that is that electrolysers are currently very expensive and they are needed for all sorts of e-fuels.
However electric boilers are cheap and storing a lot of heat is also very cheap and easy. The only thing you need is a giant tank and some insulation around it. There are a lot of under ground caverns from mining to work with. Then you can use the heat for district heating or for industry.
Yes, you can get it on the right site under exports as an .csv file
Here’s what it looks like after 7 (top) and 30 (bottom) days of averaging to give an idea of how much more reliability you can buy with a week or month of grid storage.
Of course, there is also variability on the demand side you need to match. Hmm…
So, a few thoughts on this. If you consider the minimum on any of these graphs as a kind of base load capacity, you would need to build enough solar and wind to cover what’s demanded by the population. The fluctuating part above that line is excess which maybe might find some sort of opportunistic use but will more likely be discarded. I guess the industry term for this is curtailment.
The more you invest in storage, the less you will need to curtail. But given that even with a month worth of storage (which is a colossal amount if you crunch the numbers), there will be some curtailment, my takeaway from this is that there is room for synthetic fuel production like green hydrogen that would kick in once you’ve saturated all your batteries, pumped hydro, etc. I’d been wondering about this. There is energy loss (relative to say batteries) in making fuel out of electricity, but the energy in this case is essentially free, so why not give it a go? And we are really good at stockpiling fuels. The amount of energy stored that way around the world is orders of magnitude beyond everything else combined.
The problem with that is that electrolysers are currently very expensive and they are needed for all sorts of e-fuels.
However electric boilers are cheap and storing a lot of heat is also very cheap and easy. The only thing you need is a giant tank and some insulation around it. There are a lot of under ground caverns from mining to work with. Then you can use the heat for district heating or for industry.